Welcome to the Life after Photoshop photo-editing A-Z. It’s very easy to use – just click a heading to expand a definition of that term. There are links to specific programs and many of the entries link to a tag which will show related articles. I hope you find it useful.
British vs American spellings
This A-Z uses British rather than American spellings, e.g. ‘colour’ rather than ‘color’. Apologies if this is confusing. This link may prove helpful.
G
- GamutGamut is another word for the range of colors that fit in a 'color space'. So you would say, for example, that Adobe RGB has a wider 'gamut' than sRGB, or that a high-end monitor for photographers can display the Adobe RGB gamut.
- Geometry (Lightroom)
- Ghosting (HDR)When you merge a series of different exposures to create a single HDR image, you sometimes get movement between the frames from leaves blowign in the breeze, waves, pedestrians and moving vehicles, and these can cause ‘ghosting’ in the merged image. Most HDR software has a ‘ghost removal’ option which slows down the merging process but can reduce or remove this ghosting.
- Gigabytes (GB)A unit of storage used both for computer hard disks (and SSDs) and for memory cards. 1GB is approximately 1,000 megabytes.
- Glamour Glow (Colour Efex Pro)A filter in Color Efex Pro, part of the Nik Collection, which applies a soft focus ‘glow’ to an image with additional controls for colour saturation and ‘warmth’. This can be used to give portraits a soft, romantic look, but it’s also very effective for landscapes, still lifes and other kinds of photography where you want to create dreamy, evocative mood.
- Glow effectThis has two possible meanings. One is a soft-focus ‘glow’ used to enhance portraits, for example. The other is an undesirable side-effect of HDR or localised contrast techniques, where the software attempts to blend one area of adjustment with another but creates a soft ‘glow’ effect around objects as a result.
- Golden hourIn photography, this is the hour after sunrise or the hour before sunset, where the sun is low in the sky and casts an attractive, warm light that makes landscapes look more appealing. Sometimes it’s possible to replicate this effect in software – Skylum Luminar has a ‘Golden Hour’ filter.
- Google DriveOnline cloud storage system offered by Google as part of its Gmail, Google Photos, Google Docs system and more. You get a small amount of Google Drive storage with your free account, but you will need to pay a subscription for more storage space. It’s an alternative to Dropbox.
- Google PhotosA free photo storage and sharing tool that’s part of your Google account. You can store, sort and search all your photos online and they’re automatically available in your smart devices too, via a Google Photos app. It’s not designed for professional use, but it does use machine learning, or artificial intelligence, to identify your photos automatically, saving lots of manual keywording and tagging.
- Gradient MapA type of adjustment layer that translates the different brightness levels in a photo on to points on a gradient. It’s an effect you wouldn’t necessarily use that often, though you can effectively convert a colour image to black and white using a black-white gradient map, for example.
- Gradient maskAn image mask that transitions from clear to opaque gradually using a soft gradient. It could be used to darken a bright sky in a landscape shot, for example, without producing a hard edge where the adjustment takes effect.
- GradingThe video equivalent of the image-enhancement stills photographers carry out on their images. Videographers ‘grade’ video to match the colours and exposures between clips, to create a certain ‘look’ or to edit video shot in a ‘log’ mode for extra dynamic range.
- Graduated filtersGraduated filters are used most for outdoor shots where there's a bright sky and a much darker landscape beneath it. Adding a graduated filter digitally gives you a lot more control, and with a 'digital' grad you can mask out tall objects so that they aren't darkened along with the sky.
- Grain Film grain is caused by the random clumping of silver halide grains (black and white) or dye clouds (colour film) – the individual grains or colour spots are too small to see. Grain is one a film characteristic that was largely unpopular at the time, but is now considered an intrinsic part of that film 'look'.
- Guided Upright (Lightroom)